LKY gets the Warhol treatment
August 16, 2013 Leave a comment
PUBLISHED AUGUST 16, 2013
Kuan Yew gets the Warhol treatment
Artistic tribute: Sondhi’s painting ‘Singapore Icon: LKY Quartet 1’ (2013, mixed media on canvas, 24″x24″, at left) is priced at $1,400 – PHOTO: SUKESHI SONDHI
WHAT do politician Lee Kuan Yew and artist Andy Warhol have in common? Quite a number of things. Both are famous men born in the 1920s and both founded something – Mr Lee founded modern, independent Singapore in 1965, while Warhol founded the pop art movement in the 1960s. Perhaps, it is apt then that artist Sukeshi Sondhi has chosen to render Mr Lee in distinctly Warholian pop art style for her upcoming solo exhibition of some 20 paintings. Using an image of Mr Lee from the 1960s when he was a young man, she depicts him in various bright colours, repeating the same image across all her canvases.This is the same method employed by Warhol whose two most famous pieces, the Marilyns and the Campbell Soup Cans, comprise repetitions of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup can images.
But why Mr Lee for an entire exhibition? “Because whether you love him or hate him, he is still the only true celebrity Singapore has ever produced,” Sondhi says of the man who celebrates his 90th birthday on Sept 16, which is also when the exhibition opens to the public. If you travel outside of Singapore and ask people to name someone famous from Singapore, the answer will almost invariably be ‘Lee Kuan Yew’.”
Like Warhol who used the process of repeating the celebrity’s image to comment on how the projected persona eventually overtakes the actual person, Ms Sondhi hopes to make the same point, that “repetition simultaneously celebrates and erodes the mystique of the celebrity”, she explains. The process of creating the paintings involved mixed media applications using multiple silkscreens to give each painting a unique look.
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